Fruitless discussions about 'security guarantees' for Ukraine continue. It will still take time until it is acknowledged that there is no way to implement them. Meanwhile other ideas are cropping in.
Some dimwits in Europe still think that they will be able to prevent Russia from taking care of its security interests:
On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will co-host a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” comprised mostly of European allies. The discussions are expected to involve what potential security guarantees for Ukraine could look like and what type of peacekeeping force might be required.
The idea is to establish a setup that would prevent Russia from relaunching attacks on Ukrainian territory if a peace deal or cease-fire is established between the two countries.
President Donald Trump has signaled that the United States could play some kind of role in the effort, although he has ruled out putting American forces in Ukraine. [NATO Secretary-General Mark] Rutte on Wednesday also said the expectation was that the U.S would be involved in some form.
There will be no ceasefire in Ukraine. There will be a peace agreement in the form of a treaty. Ukraine and Russia sides will have to agree to its parameters. The Russian site will insist that Ukraine will be demilitarized and that no foreign forces will be stationed on its land.
European countries are unable to give any real 'security guarantees'. What they could provide is a minuscule force of a few thousand men stationed somewhere in Ukraine. Such a force would be eradicated within minutes should, after a peace agreement, the conflict in Ukraine reignite.
The Ukrainian regime has come to understand that. It has moved away from requesting 'security guarantees' in form of foreign soldiers. It instead wants a huge amount of foreign money to buy and make new weapons.
As the New York Times wrote yesterday:
Ukraine Pursues a Weapons Buildup More Potent Than Any Security Guarantee (archived) – New York Times
Kyiv sees a well-equipped army as a stronger deterrent to Moscow than any Western pledges to defend it. It is working to attract billions to buy more arms.
Kyiv wants not only to sustain its army through the current war but also to make it the backbone of any postwar settlement, with the goal of deterring Russia from invading again. As Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, recently put it: “Ukraine must become a steel porcupine, undigestible for potential invaders.”
At the center of these efforts is a new NATO-backed procurement system that will channel European funds into buying U.S. weapons for Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes the system will enable $1 billion in purchases each month, with a particular focus on acquiring U.S.-made Patriot air-defense systems to expand Kyiv’s limited arsenal.
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Ukraine is focused on developing its own security guarantees that its much larger neighbor cannot undermine. Kyiv’s domestic weapon production and its acquisition of Western arms are areas where Moscow has little leverage.“This is not something the Russians can really discuss,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, Ukraine’s new ambassador to NATO. “That’s our advantage.”
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Ukraine does not only want to receive lots of weapons, paid for by Europe, but also wants to build a weapon industry with financing also coming from foreign sources:
[Maksym Skrypchenko, the president of the Transatlantic Dialogue Center, a research group in Kyiv,] said Ukraine was working to channel Western money not only into buying foreign weapons but also into its own defense industry, which has grown rapidly during the war but still lacks the funding needed to produce at scale.
That could allow Ukraine to produce the very missiles Western partners have been reluctant to supply — or have delivered under strict usage limits — for fear of escalation. The United States, Britain and France have provided small batches of ballistic and cruise missiles, but their use is restricted so that they cannot be used to strike major Russian cities like Moscow. Germany has long refused to transfer its long-range Taurus cruise missiles.
Fire Point, the Ukrainian defense firm behind the Flamingo missile, said it would welcome Western funding to speed up production. The company says it currently makes one missile per day, but plans to increase output sevenfold by this fall. Ukraine has also developed a short-range ballistic missile named Sapsan that recently entered production.
That this is a serious attempt by Ukraine to move the 'security guarantee' discussion towards a record financial transaction to Kiev is underlined by an op-ed by its former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kulebain the Washington Post:
Ukraine doesn’t need a security guarantee (archived) – Dmytro Kuleba / Washington Post
Western boots on the ground won’t secure peace. Arming Ukraine and politically integrating it will.
[S]tationing foreign troops far behind the lines as “reassurance forces” (the option most often floated as an alternative to more robust peacekeeping) would also have limited effect. The Ukrainian people would almost certainly welcome such deployments. But reassurance forces would neither hasten the war’s end nor prevent hostilities from reigniting after any ceasefire. Moscow, meanwhile, has already rejected the idea, claiming it would be a pretense for putting a NATO presence on Ukrainian soil.
Instead of debating such dead ends, Ukraine’s partners should immediately move to provide a robust assistance package, coupled with firm commitments to Ukraine’s political integration in the West. Weapons need to be provided at an even larger scale — to be mass-produced in Western countries as well as in Western-financed factories inside Ukraine. Ensuring uninterrupted supply on a strict timeline is vital. The buildup of a European military-industrial complex needs to take place alongside Ukraine’s admission to the European Union as a full member on an accelerated (though still merit-based) schedule.
The attempt to get 'security guarantees' in the form of money for weapons and weapon fabrications is just as doomed as the idea of putting western troops on the ground.
From the NYT piece quoted above:
Europe has already outpaced the United States in military aid, providing roughly $95 billion to Washington’s $75 billion, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Ukraine has already received weapons at a value of $170 billion. How much did they deter the Russian from fighting?
The Europeans have difficulties to grow their economies while facing higher interest rates and aging societies. It is ludicrous to expect that they will indefinitely continue to finance weapons for Ukraine.
The idea of building western-financed weapon factories in Ukraine can already be seen as a failure.
The NYT piece asserts:
Kyiv’s domestic weapon production and its acquisition of Western arms are areas where Moscow has little leverage.
“This is not something the Russians can really discuss,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, Ukraine’s new ambassador to NATO. “That’s our advantage.”
The Russia Armed Forces disagree with that statement.
Germany allegedly provided the money and technology to develop the short-range ballistic missile named Sapsan which was to be produced in Ukraine.
By August 11 the Russia forces had ended that endeavor:
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed Thursday that it crippled Ukraine’s ability to launch strikes deep inside Russia after it carried out a special operation along with the Defense Ministry against Ukrainian missile production facilities.
The FSB said it had discovered the locations of buildings and air defense systems involved in the production and protection of Ukraine’s Sapsan ballistic missile system, also known by its export designation Hrim-2, in the Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
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Russia’s Defense Ministry said […] the strikes were conducted throughout July, targeting Ukrainian design bureaus, rocket fuel production facilities and missile assembly plants in the Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions.The Russian military also said it destroyed four launchers of the Western-supplied Patriot surface-to-air missile system and a U.S.-made target detection and guidance radar in the Dnipropetrovsk region alone.
The FSB claimed that Ukraine had developed the Sapsan/Hrim-2 with financial support from “specialists” of an unidentified Western European country.
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Ukrainian media previously reported that the Sapsan missile completed combat testing in May after successfully striking a Russian military target at a range of almost 300 kilometers (186 miles).
Another deep strike hit the factory of a U.S. manufacturer of electronic circuit boards, Flex-tronic, in western Ukraine. Circuit boards are needed for Ukraine's mass drone production. Six hundred employees, working the night shift to allegedly 'build coffee makers', had fled into the companies bunkers when several cruise missiles arrived. It took several days to expunge the fire.
A Turkish company had built and equipped a factory to make Bayraktar drones in Ukraine. The factory was supposed to open at the end of August. Days before the official opening Russian missiles arrived:
The factory where Turkish Bayraktar drones are assembled continues to burn near Kiev. The day before, several Russian missiles hit the workshops. The building was seriously damaged. The production process was disrupted.
The video of the fire is published today, August 29, by Channel Five.
Together those were at least three large strikes in just one month against western-financed weapon production sites in Ukraine. Any future weapon factory build with western finance in Ukraine will receive a similar treatment.
Such facilities are just too big and obvious to operate in total secret. The Russian security service will find them and mark them for destruction as soon as the most expensive machinery for them has been installed and is ready to go.
'Security guarantees' in form of western troops on the ground are just not going to happen.
'Security guarantees' in form of weapon deliveries or weapon production within Ukraine are not sustainable.
The only real 'security guarantee' Ukraine can get is through a piece agreement with Russia. This will require Ukraine to give up on land, to commit to neutrality and to behave well.
President Alexander Stubb of Finland argues in the Economist that Ukraine should follow his country's (previous) model:
What Finland could teach Ukraine about war and peace (archived) – Economist
President Alexander Stubb argues Ukraine can repeat Finland’s success
Finland’s experience has been cited from the start of the war in Ukraine—both as a model to avoid and one perhaps to follow. Mannerheim’s speech was circulated in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office in the first months of the war, but was put to one side.
The peace that was imposed on Finland in 1944 was hardly just. But it could have been worse. Finland handed over 10% of its territory, including Karelia and half of Lake Ladoga. Its army was restricted, as was its ability to join NATO. It was forced to let Russia lease a naval base on Porkkala, a peninsula in the Gulf of Finland just 30km from the capital. And, because it had joined forces with Hitler, it was forced to pay reparations to the Soviet Union which had attacked it five years earlier.
To much of the world, this was a defeat. To Mr Stubb, whose father was born in the territory annexed by the Soviet Union, and whose summer house stands in Porkkala, back in Finnish hands since the 1950s, it looks different.
The simple secret of living peacefully next to a mighty neighbor, Finland had found, was to behave well:
Lacking any security guarantees from the West or anyone else, Finland exercised this independence not by turning anti-Russian—which would almost certainly have resulted in another invasion—but by building one of the most successful countries in Europe. “People didn’t wait for perfect conditions. They worked with what they had,” Risto Penttilä, a foreign-policy expert, explains.
In politics and in the media Finland carefully avoided anything that could anger Moscow. To most outsiders, what became known as “Finlandisation” was a servile form of appeasement. To Mr Stubb and most of his countrymen, “it was the definition of realpolitik at a time when we did not have a choice.” It allowed Finland to stick to its core values: universal education, social welfare and the rule of law.
The 'Finlandization' of Ukraine, if done seriously, would satisfy major Russian demands – neutrality, demilitarization and denazification. It is a realistic base for successful peace talks.
I am encourage that the Economist, as a major mainstream outlet, has picked up on this.
For the idea to ripen it will have to wait until the powers-that-be have recognized that all other variants of 'security guarantees', be they troops on the ground or weapon-fabrications, are rather pipe-dreams than serious plans.